The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die: The first book in an addictive crime series that will have you gripped. Marnie Riches
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girl?
Van den Bergen had sent an accompanying attachment, which was a photo of a blonde woman. George did indeed recognise her face. She was a drop-out politics student in the year above. George had met her once briefly in a bar where some of the other students hung out. Joachim and Klaus had been all over her like a rash. The evening was memorable because the woman had thrown a glass of beer all over Joachim but had left with Klaus.
She texted van den Bergen back.
She’s called Janneke something or other. She’s one of Fennemans’ old students. Why?
The answer came back as George was enjoying her pudding of hash-cakes and ice cream.
She has been murdered.
‘Cheers,’ Fennemans said to his mother.
They clinked glasses together. He watched as the elegant matriarch of the family sniffed the contents of her champagne flute.
‘Asti spumante?’ his sister asked, staring at the rising bubbles. ‘At Christmas?’
‘It’s prosecco. And a good one at that,’ Fennemans said.
His mother swept her carefully coiffed white hair to the side, sipped the sparkling wine cautiously and swallowed in what appeared to be a reluctant manner. ‘Oh, Vim. I wish you’d let me open the Laurent Perrier. The Italians are far better left to their chiantis and barolos. Did you buy this at the supermarket?’
His mother turned to his sister. ‘Vim has never had much of a nose for wine, has he? Not like us, darling. You get your palate from me.’ She patted his sister’s manicured hand. The two of them exchanged self-satisfied smiles.
Fennemans had been feeling celebratory when he had arrived. That feeling had long since evaporated. With every bite of his foie gras on toast, he wanted to tell them both to drop dead. Drop dead, drop dead, drop dead.
Every Christmas, the enmity surged inside him like a noxious, mushrooming cloud. Mother would be condescending and would take his sister’s side in some ill-informed debate about politics, made tedious by the fact that his mother and sister were intensely conservative and ignorant of anything that happened outside of the Netherlands. His sister would belittle him at the dining table and then spend the evening boasting about how well her legal practice was doing and how successful her Swiss paediatric consultant husband was (he would be there, of course, if it weren’t for the fact that he was saving precious little lives on Christmas Day).
‘I said, when are you going to get yourself a woman, Vim?’ his mother asked.
Her beautifully made-up eyes peered at him over her Bulgari spectacles. Fennemans realised she had been waiting for an answer for more than thirty seconds. He had been too lost in a labyrinth of his own hostility to hear her.
His sister snorted and collected up the empty starter plates. ‘Vim get a woman? Come on, Mum!’ She turned to him with an unpleasant smile. It was as though he had never grown beyond the age of ten, with Sofie, the favoured twin; older by fourteen minutes, preferred by a country mile and indulged without temperance once his father, the erstwhile arbitrator, had been taken by his dicky ticker that Mother had fed to bursting point with butter and cream and fatty pork. ‘Who’d have him with his cheese feet and boring jazz collection?’
‘Okay. That’s it. I’m going,’ he said, rising from his chair quickly.
Last year, he had contemplated doing this but this year, he was really doing it. He was walking away.
‘Sit down, Vim. I’ve made venison,’ his mother said.
He slammed the door behind him. That felt good. He crunched down the gravel drive. That felt better. Got into the car, drove around the corner out of sight and parked up. He pressed the buttons on his mobile phone.
‘It’s Fennemans,’ he said. ‘Look, you’ve got your money now. We’re straight, aren’t we?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Well, can I see the girls this evening? I need to unwind.’
‘I’m away on business.’
Fennemans looked out of the windscreen at the sprawling, well-tended houses and gardens that suffocated him on all sides. ‘Please. I’m your best customer, aren’t I? You said it yourself. Can’t you make a call?’
There was a pause and some laboured breathing at the other end of the phone. ‘Six o’clock at the house. Bring cash and give it to Aunty Fadilla.’
Fennemans hung up, gripped his steering wheel and allowed himself to exhale slowly through pursed lips. He reached over to the glove box and took out the packet of cigarettes that he kept there as an emergency. One wouldn’t hurt. He took out the box of matches and lit up, enjoying the nicotine rush as it slapped him about the head. Smiling to himself, he tossed the match out of the car window.
‘Of course you can come in,’ Janneke’s mother said to van den Bergen, holding the door wide.
Though the rims of her eyes were bloodshot, van den Bergen could see the likeness between the mother and the photo of the dead daughter that had been stapled to the case notes, accidentally left in his in-tray by the Christmas admin temp.
She wrung her hands. ‘They’ve only just let me come back and clear up. I was at my sister’s when I heard. I don’t really want to be …’ Her words tailed off and headed down a blind alley.
Van den Bergen smelled death and grief in the air. It made his hip ache.
‘I’m very sorry for your loss, Mrs Polman.’
He looked around the tidy house and felt empty on the woman’s behalf when he saw the Christmas tree with its fairy lights turned off. There was a large dark stain on the wood floor.
‘Would you like a coffee?’
‘No thanks. Can I see Janneke’s room please?’
‘But the police have already been.’ She looked helplessly towards the stairs. ‘I suppose you’re just doing your job. You’ll find him, right?’
Van den Bergen watched as Janneke’s mother’s chin dimpled up and her eyes filled with glassy tears.
‘I’ll be in the kitchen,’ she said.
In the dusty silence of the dead girl’s room, he looked around at her things and tried to get a feel for who the girl had been. Who did she know that wanted her dead? Why would somebody want to cut her throat? And what the hell was he doing here, snooping into another detective’s case when he should have been concentrating on al Badaar?
Quietly, at the back of his mind, van den Bergen acknowledged that she had been a Social and Behavioural Science student. Like Joachim Guttentag, who had just been reported missing by his parents. Both belonging to the same faculty that had been targeted by a suicide bomber. He made a mental note to get Elvis and Marie to look into Guttentag’s disappearance if he still hadn’t showed by the New Year.
He looked through her books. There were no academic texts. Nothing to indicate that she had been a studious girl. There was no makeup. No posters of bands on the walls. No photographs of boyfriends. The room had an impersonal feel to it and yet he could tell from the slept-in bedding and the drawers full of clothes that this was indeed her main abode. He decided that she had stripped from it any trace of femininity or her previous life as a student. Why? What had happened to Janneke Polman?
‘I brought you a coffee anyway,’ her mother said.
Van den Bergen jumped and turned around to see the weary woman standing against the architrave of the door. He smiled at her. ‘Thanks,’ he said. The coffee was black. He hated black coffee but he drank it anyway and steeled himself not to pull a face. ‘It’s good coffee. Listen, Mrs Polman.’
‘Call me Lydia.’
‘Lydia. Why did Janneke drop out of college?’
Lydia pushed a stray